The Butch/Femme Chronicles...
Kimberly Dark toured The Butch/Femme Chronicles: Discussions With Women Who Are Not Like Me (and Some Who Are) between 1998 and 2002. She last performed the show in Dublin in 2004 and thought, how lovely; and I am finished.
But folks keep asking for it - and it's a good show! So, in December 2006, she adapted the script for ensemble production. The show is written as poetry - a series of separate vignettes about lesbian lives - the subtle ways in which lesbians who don't necessarily identify with the terms "butch" and "femme" recreate gender in our every day lives. The show is funny, moving, sad and exciting - and now you can produce it yourself!
The script allows for an expandable number of players, much as the vignettes of The Vagina Monologues are performed. Please email info@kimberlydark.com to request the script for review. The women of Ohio Wesleyan University are doing a first production of the show in March 2007...
And here's some of the press about the show during the time Kimberly was performing it!
From the Southern California Gay and Lesbian Times:
"As a performer, Dark is both direct and directive. She is forthrightly honest in a way that is as daring as it is unpretentious. She simply says what she wants to say, but more importantly she means it and stands behind the daring things she says. Small wonder - that large commitment. What Dark had to say was, well, true. If that's not a definition of daring, perhaps it ought to be.
The Butch-Femme Chronicles explores the always tricky and sometimes thorny territory that lesbians inhabit. Dark charts the distances between self and image, butch and femme, and the cultural stereotypes of pretty and ugly. She maps out the journeys that we take as strangers, sisters and lovers in private and public. Dark expertly weaves together her backgrounds in poetry, performance and social science to present a beautifully wrought and highly informed account of how lesbians negotiate the heterosexually coded word in shades of lipstick-femme, soft-butch and bull-dyke.
In her poetry, Dark uses a mutable "I" to present her material so that she may move easily from persona to persona, from inside the thick of it to the outside looking in, form confusion to clarity, from humor to pathos, from exposing cliché to exploring the truth.
Her choice of detail is outstanding, and her words are powerful. Dark brings out the astonishing beauty, the disorienting absurdity, and the intense emotionally imbedded in the mundane moments of the lesbian everyday... -
read the whole review
From The Colorado State University Rocky Mountain Collegian:
Kimberly Dark runs her fingers through her thick, black hair as she tells a story of passionate, sometimes painful, love. Her demeanor is soft. The audience is engaged by her presence. A coy smile creeps across her lips when she mentions a former lover. A master of female flirtation, the audience draws near to hear her.
Not your typical lesbian, right? This tendency to stereotype is at the core of Dark's performance, "The Butch/Femme Chronicles: Discussions With Women Who Are Not Like Me (And Some Who Are)." Dark bases her poetry on personal experience and interviews with other women. She presents the poems in first person, though they tell the stories of many women… The show blends sociology, psychology and drama...
The emotionally charged content of The Butch/Femme Chronicles moved the audience. Dark's discussion of personal, sometimes startling subjects of sex, love and even physical abuse led it down a path that was both comical and discomforting. "She explores your mindset instead of telling you what to think," said Louis Balwin, a sophomore dance major. Balwin thought Dark's use of poetry allowed audience members to relate their own experiences to the stories Dark presented. Becky Wood, a non-traditional student, agreed that the performance speaks to the audience on a personal level.
"You find characteristics of yourself in all of the characters in the stories," Wood said. - read the whole review